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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

A Novel
Brief Description
THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Winner of the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction From one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$5100

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THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Winner of the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

From one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2024

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR/Fresh Air, Washington Post, The New Yorker, and TIME Magazine

One of Barack Obama's favourite books of 2023

“A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel... Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review

“We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, comes a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theatre and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalise him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theatre and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780593422953

Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 29 July 2025

Country: United States

Imprint: Riverhead Books,U.S.

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 29.0mm

Width: 139.0mm

Height: 210.0mm

Weight: 363g

Pages: 416

About the Author

James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

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